Brazil isn't necessarily the first country that springs to mind when we think of gaming, but if a current trend continues then perhaps one day it will be.
It can sometimes be hard to track exactly how the video game industry is doing amid the current climate. On the one hand, you can point to phenomena such as Fortnite and claim that gaming is in better shape now than it has ever been. One title boasting more than 10 million concurrent players and raking in billions of dollars of revenue each year can't be a bad thing, right?
On the other hand, you can point to developers and companies having to lay off hundreds of people in the last year alone and suggest that there might actually be a problem. EA and TellTale would be considered major players by most with a passing interest in video games, and both have had to lay off hundreds of people in the past year.
One area of the world that doesn't appear to be struggling within the wide world of gaming is Brazil. Not the first country that springs to mind when you think video games, but perhaps it should be. According to PocketGamer.biz, the size of Brazil's gaming industry has more than doubled in the space of just five years.
As of the end of 2018, there were 2,731 staff working across 276 games studios in Brazil. In 2014, those figures were 1,133 and 133 respectively. What's even more impressive is the massive growth of the Brazil Independent Games Festival. Seven years ago, just 4,000 gamers attended the festival to hear about projects from 20 studios. Fast forward to 2019, and the number of attendees was in excess of 36,000 and 428 different studios were represented.
The market is clearly there to be taken advantage of in Brazil. It is estimated that Brazilian gamers will have spent $1.5 billion on video games by the end of the year. While the US and Japan are the two countries that immediately spring to mind when it comes to the world leaders in the video game industry, perhaps in a decade from now, Brazil could join them to complete a top three.